Dimensioning and location planning of broadband wireless networks under multi-level cooperative relaying

This paper studies the problem of network dimensioning and location planning (DLP) in multi-hop wireless networks by incorporating recent advances in wireless multilevel cooperative relaying (CR), which has been recognized as an effective design paradigm for achieving throughput/capacity enhancement in modern metropolitan area networks. The paper is committed to develop an optimization framework and a suite of decent solution approaches which can manipulatively capture the nature of the DLP problem and precisely characterize the behavior of multi-level cooperative relaying. For this purpose, the tasks of dimensioning, relay placement, relay allocation, and signal relay sequence design are jointly considered and accommodated into a unified framework. To make the solution of the optimization problem computationally tractable, a heuristic two-phase algorithm is developed. Simulation and case studies are conducted to verify the proposed optimization framework, and the results demonstrate the significant cost reduction and achievable rate improvement due to multi-level CR.